


if we end it now

by youcouldmakealife



Series: between the teeth [7]
Category: Original Work
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-04
Updated: 2014-02-04
Packaged: 2018-01-11 03:46:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1168294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youcouldmakealife/pseuds/youcouldmakealife
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You still can’t call me Chaps,” David says blankly.</p><p>“Okay,” Jake says. “David, then.”</p><p>“I’m not going to call you Lourdy,” David says. “That’s stupid.”</p><p>Jake laughs again. David thinks it might be a condition.</p>
            </blockquote>





	if we end it now

David takes a flight back home first thing the next morning after a shitty night of sleep, exchanging a later ticket for the first one to take him northeast. When he gets back to Ottawa it’s to a quiet, empty house, a routine that feels empty, since no matter what David does, it’s never going to be good enough.

He trains as hard as he can, until his trainer’s starting to make noises about quitting if he keeps it up, because he doesn’t want to be the trainer who injures his clients. It’s probably an empty threat, with the extra money David’s shelled out to have him personally, but does make David slow down enough to catch his breath. 

Has it caught until all the headlines take it right away. David doesn’t read the hockey blogs, they’ve been trashing him since he even started to get into the public eye; before he even made the U-18 they were talking about him, and anything nice was drowned out by insults he remembers to this day. But hockey blogs are one thing, the national news is another, and the first hockey player to come out as gay is national news in Canada. It’s a fourth-liner on the Leafs, someone David doesn’t even really recall despite playing them three times over the season, though obviously the guy wouldn’t have played against his line. He looks normal. Brown eyes, brown hair, typical guy caught with his arms around a guy, mouth occupied, and that’s what strikes David, that he wouldn’t have known if he wasn’t told, that there are people out there like him and he can’t even _tell_.

That night he does search out the hockey blogs, and it isn’t exactly hard to find articles about Dan Riley, though the majority of them say about the same thing (‘about time’), and nothing else. His mom’s back from Moscow the next day, and David takes it easy enough during training to make his trainer look relieved, makes dinner as quietly as he can while his mom takes a nap on the couch.

He wakes her when it’s ready, clearing his throat from across the room until she startles, comes to the table when he mentions dinner. He’s got the first bite in his mouth when, instead of mentioning something like the weather in Moscow or how beautiful the Kremlin is, she says, “I assume you’ve heard about that gay young man in your league?”

David tries not to choke on his bite, swallows with effort. “Yeah,” he says, belatedly. “It’s pretty big news.”

“I hope your league treats that young man with the respect he deserves,” his mom says, looking over at him like he, personally, was planning on doing otherwise. “I know sports are very homophobic.”

David swallows hard around nothing, twice, trying to keep silent, before he can’t. “What would you know about my league anyway?” he says, finally. “You don’t even watch my fucking games.”

“David,” she says. 

David drops his fork on his plate. “I’m going to my room,” he says. “I’ll leave for Toronto tomorrow.”

“David Benjamin Chapman,” she yells after him, and he slams the door to his room behind him, like he’s thirteen again, finding out his parents were the only ones who weren’t going to come to the tournament in Lake Placid, the biggest in his life so far.

He pulls his suitcase open, then his drawers, doesn’t even bother sorting before he starts shoving clothes in, swiping impatiently at his eyes. He hears footsteps in the hall approach then pause, and he grabs a fistful of socks. He could leave tonight, there’s no way there isn’t a bus or a train to Toronto running in the next couple hours.

“I understand you’re disappointed that I don’t have the time to watch your games,” his mom says, voice ringing clear through the door. “But it’s a very large time commitment and you know how important my job is. I would like you to act like an adult and come out and finish your dinner, because you are behaving like a spoiled child right now.”

“Fuck off,” David yells, hoarse and choked, and he hears her retreat, finally. He finishes packing what he can, doesn’t bother going to the bathroom--he can pick up toiletries in any drugstore, and if he doesn’t leave in the next five minutes he’s going to break down and sob like the child his mom is accusing him of acting like.

He shoves his laptop into his backpack, hauls it on, pulling the door open gently and practically tiptoeing to the front door, which would work better if his mom wasn’t sitting on the living room couch.

She looks up from her laptop, taking in his suitcase as he shoves his feet into shoes, then sighs dramatically. “This is childish, David,” she says. “I taught you better than this.”

 _You didn’t teach me shit_ , David thinks, wants to say, but doesn’t, because he _was_ taught better, just not by her. _I’m gay,_ he thinks, and doesn’t say because the words choke him even in his head. Wants to know if she’d be so high and mighty about the homophobia of sports if she knew her son was gay, but that’d probably just exacerbate it, and she’d love that, a chance to say ‘my gay son’ instead of ‘my hockey player son’. It’d be better for her career.

“I’ll find different lodgings next offseason,” David says stiffly, and she stands, but he’s already out the door, walks the entire way to the station because he doesn’t want to stop long enough to get on a bus, can’t stop or he’ll have to let it sink in. There’s a Greyhound into Toronto within the hour, and David buys a ticket, a can of pop from the vending machine, a sub because he had barely any dinner, and it’s too long a trip to ignore eating. It tastes like cardboard, though he doesn’t know if that’s just him or if it’s supposed to taste that way.

He gets into Toronto around three, takes the night bus down to the hotel Dave’s arranged during training. The night receptionist seems unimpressed with his interest in a room, but she warms up considerably once she finds out he’s just trying to extend a month long stay by a couple days.

“Our premium suite is unavailable until your booking starts,” she says, suddenly very apologetic. “Would it be acceptable for a studio for the interim?” 

“That’s fine,” David says tiredly. He just wants to sleep, and he would have managed it on the _bus_ if there hadn’t been a crying baby two rows ahead of him. 

The studio’s still impressive, not that David looks around much before he crashes. The next morning he buys replacements for all the stuff he left behind in Ottawa, calls Dave to confirm the camp details, is at fidgety, loose ends, enough so that he’s started checking more hockey blogs for the reactions to Riley (mostly they’re pretty okay, but there are a few that make David flinch, especially a fairly vicious one from a NYC based writer explaining why gay men have no place in the sport), until he ends up buying a ticket to the Jays game that night just so he won’t keep dwelling on it.

The Jays lose, and David buys a drink at the hotel bar to help him sleep, then another when it doesn’t work. No one bothers him, so he lingers over a third before he goes to bed, though he can only sleep for a few hours at a time, waking up occasionally with his heart in his throat. Afraid, though of what he doesn’t know.

The next day he walks under a baking June sun, walks until he doesn’t know where he is, which doesn’t take long, and then keeps going, until he’s sweaty and hot and starting to burn despite the sunscreen he applied before he left. Then he walks back in the direction he came from, takes a cool shower in his room, which doesn’t do anything for the way he’s pink and flushed, hot to the touch and sore. He sleeps on his stomach like he always does, and that night he wakes up every few hours just because his face is burning, high thread count pillowcases scratching like they’re burlap. Nothing helps, not the aloe he picked up, not trying to sleep on his back, because all that brings is insomnia, and the last thing he needs right now is uninterrupted hours to think. He’s got months until the season starts and nothing but this camp to do with them, and the more he thinks of options the more he realises how few there are. That he’s got nothing else to do.

The following day is another scratch, but it’s Canada Day, and David feels obligated to take part in the festivities. Toronto doesn’t celebrate like Ottawa does, maybe, but fireworks bloom over Lake Ontario, and David stays up until they fade before taking an early night, mostly managing to sleep through it, though he’s up at five, a tight knot of excitement in him, the most he’s felt since the night before the Awards, though the less said about that, the better.

The training camp’s outside of the city proper, and David cabs it, arriving half an hour early, the first in the room, before even Caldwell and Majors, the trainers running the show, have arrived. Guys trickle in slowly, some David recognizes from the ice, the press, some he doesn’t, and Caldwell and Majors seem to know who they’re expecting, since they wait until five after the hour, when the last guy walks in, and Majors straightens up and starts explaining their mission. David looks over to see who can’t even be bothered to arrive on time the first day, and it shouldn’t be surprising, but is, to see Jake Lourdes leaning beside the door at the far end of the room, drowsy eyed and slouching. The knot that’s been sitting in David’s stomach for days only worsens, and becomes unbearable when Lourdes seems to realise someone’s looking at him, looking up to catch David watching him.

Lourdes meets his eye for a long moment, then looks away when someone David recognizes from the Panthers touches his shoulder, says something that makes him laugh quietly, eyes crinkling around the corners. He doesn’t look at David after that. Not that David’s looking over to check.

There are forty-four of them, a pretty even spread between elite players and roster fillers, two goalies who must’ve gotten lost or really want to practice their skating and their checks, and Caldwell and Majors announce they’re splitting them into two teams to play one another at the end of training, and in the meantime they’ll be assigned to one trainer or the other, depending on which team they land on.

They draw cards from a hat instead of doing something that would better spread out the talent, and David rolls his eyes when it comes to him, pulls out a red card. Some of the guys who must know each other are wandering over to check if they have the same colour, and David clutches his red card and hopes, desperately, that Lourdes pulls blue.

He doesn’t, because that would be too easy. Instead, when they all split into two, Majors guiding the blues out into, presumably, another, similar room. The thinned group remains with Caldwell, and Lourdes is still there, minus his friend from the Panthers. There’s finally enough room for everyone to take a seat, and David’s got a wide open space beside him, but Lourdes sits halfway across the room, running a hand distractedly through his hair until it’s out of control, probably static beneath his fingers. There’s a murmur in the room, and David catches guys to the left of him derisively discussing the Leafs’ win, others to his right asking about one another’s wives, before Caldwell clears his throat and they all quiet like they’re in church.

The exercise he suggests is more like summer camp than training camp, going around in a circle and talking about what their expectations are, what they specifically want to improve. 

“This is fucking stupid,” Marchant, sitting to David’s left, says under his breath. David agrees, but says nothing. Partly because Caldwell has a reputation, and partly because Marchant does. David doesn’t particularly want to get involved with either.

“No one fucking asked you, dickwad,” Vopni mutters back, and Marchant shoves him.

“This is not preschool,” Caldwell yells. “Grow up or I’ll throw you out. We’ve got a waiting list, it’s not too late to replace you.”

Marchant rolls his eyes, but stills, and they get around the fucking circle before Caldwell tells them to pair up and learn five things about their partner before ten minutes have passed.

“Is he sure this isn’t preschool?” Marchant asks under his breath.

“Can still kick you out, Marchant,” Caldwell says without even looking at him, and Marchant’s teeth click shut, a look of panic on his face that sets half the room laughing. “We’re only here a month, but you’re going to be a team. Maybe you hate each other. Maybe he sprained your ankle, or you insulted his girlfriend. But I will be damned if Majors beats me this year, so you will act like a goddamn team. Do you understand? You don’t want to do this, that’s fine, it’s your money and we can replace you within the day. But if you do, you’ll shut the fuck up and do what you’re told.”

“Sir yes sir,” Vopni says, saluting.

Caldwell rolls his eyes. “Partner up.”

Despite their shoving match earlier, Vopni and Marchant partner, along with the guys on David’s right, which seems like cheating, since they obviously know each other well enough to ask about their home lives. David looks around the room for someone he can recognize, or who doesn’t seem to be already in conversation, but that’s a wash until Lourdes walks up to him, stopping short once he’s a foot away.

“Can I sit?” Lourdes asks, and David stares at him for a minute before he gestures beside him.

Lourdes sits down, knee touching David’s, and David swallows, hard. “What are you doing here?” David asks, looking at the floor.

“Same as you,” Lourdes says. “Getting training.”

“You’re American,” David says, looking up. “Isn’t it a bit of a trip?”

Lourdes blinks. “You do know Detroit’s like, the same distance from Toronto as Ottawa is, right?”

David chews his lip. 

“Look,” Lourdes says. “I know you like--I know you hate me, or whatever. But apparently we’re on a team for awhile, so maybe we can call a truce?”

“It isn’t a real team,” David says. 

Lourdes’ mouth quirks. “Or maybe we can’t?” he says, finally.

“Look, Lourdes,” David starts, doesn’t know how to finish. Lourdes is smiling but it looks wrong. He looks more like he did when David had walked out the door in Las Vegas than like he does when he actually smiles, wide enough to crinkle his eyes, the sort of smile that overtakes his entire face. He smiles a lot. It’s hard not to notice.

“You know you can actually call me by my name,” Lourdes says.

“Jacob?” David asks.

Lourdes laughs. David doesn’t bother to tell him he wasn’t trying to be funny.

“Team,” Lourdes says. “Real or not, I don’t care, it’s still team. I’m Lourdy or I’m Jake.”

“You still can’t call me Chaps,” David says blankly.

“Okay,” Jake says. “David, then.”

“I’m not going to call you Lourdy,” David says. “That’s stupid.”

Jake laughs again. David thinks it might be a condition.

Caldwell rolls his eyes at them when, ten minutes later, David is not able to name five facts about Jake. Or, he could, but they’re not things he’s personally been told, or anything the room should know, so he just mumbles about Jake winning gold with Team USA in the World Juniors and being first draft pick and winning the Calder, and tries to ignore the feeling of twenty-two pairs of eyes on him as he recites his own failures. 

Thankfully, once they’re past the bullshit they get onto things that actually make sense. They don’t have ice-time until the next day, but they do hit the gym, and Caldwell and his assistants measure their fitness levels and David’s submitted to a bunch of questions on what he wants to improve on (everything), presumably so that they all have appropriate individual plans. That’s the rest of the day, and it’s tedious but at least David sees the point in it, so it doesn’t feel like a day wasted when he waits at the curb for the taxi he called.

He doesn’t pay attention when a non-descript car pulls up in front of him until the window rolls down and Jake looks out at him from beneath a pair of shades. “You need a ride?” Jake asks.

“I’ve got a cab coming,” David says. “But thank you for asking.”

Jake flips his shades up. “Get in the car,” he says, and David pauses until someone behind Jake beeps.

“You’re starting a traffic jam, David,” Jake says.

“I think that’s you,” David says, not moving, but the car beeps again, and David bites his lip, pulls the passenger door open, getting in.

Jake pulls away from the curb, finally, and David belts himself in, squinting against the afternoon light until Jake speaks, and then it’s just to ask where he’s going, which is easy enough to answer. They don’t make much conversation, Jake fiddling with the radio, his split attention making David nervous, not that he says anything, and it’s less painful than David would have expected, the experience, when Jake drops him off outside his hotel.

The following day they get on the ice, simple drills that they’ve all been doing since they were kids. Or at least David has, since it’s hard to tell with some of them. David’s unsure if it’s rust or simply bad training, but if their team is going to win at the end of the month, they need to tighten up. He says so to Caldwell at the end of the day, and Caldwell breaks the grim face he’s always got to laugh, which startles David. “You’re really going to be something,” Caldwell says, and it sounds nice, but David’s not sure if it’s a compliment or not.

Jake insists on driving him home that night too, and the night after, not pushing him to say anything, acting more like a chauffeur than anything, and it makes David uncomfortable for some reason he can’t name, until he finds himself awkwardly asking if Lourdes wants to come and get a drink at the bar with him, even though neither of them should be drinking.

Jake chews his lip, and David doesn’t know what he was fucking thinking.

“No, I--” Jake says, and David’s ready to turn around and head inside, before he continues, “you want to come over to mine? Watch a movie or something? I’ve got all the fixings to make these monster salads my dad used to make, they’re awesome, they’re not even like salads.”

“I--” David says, then, “Okay.” He gets back in the car.

Jake actually backtracks to get to his place, which makes David feel dimly guilty, and it isn’t a hotel, like David was expecting, but a decently upscale condo.

“Is this yours?” he asks, when they get inside. He’s got the money to throw away, but it seems like a waste.

“It belongs to a buddy on the Marlies,” Jake says. “He’s letting me crash here since he’s out of town anyways.”

David wonders what kind of ‘buddy’ Jake’s talking about. Whether he fucks around with all his ‘buddies’, since he’s so insistent that David’s one. 

“You want a beer?” Jake asks, wandering towards the kitchen.

They may be legal in Ontario, but they’re in training, even if it’s been pretty lacklustre. Jake smirks like he knows what David’s thinking, and ends up bringing them both a bottle of water. “Thank you,” David says, when Jake hands it over, then sprawls on the couch beside where David has perched, not close enough to touch, but close enough that David can feel the heat of his body. He swallows hard around the knot tying in him again, and then around a sip of water, which doesn’t clear it, however much he wants it to.

“What do you want to watch?” Jake asks. “He’s got like, hundreds of channels. There’s a whole channel for action movies, it’s pretty--”

David leans in. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, not even when he’s doing it, and the brim of Jake’s baseball hat hits him in the forehead while Jake’s mid sentence, which makes Jake pause. “--awesome,” Jake says, presumably finishing his sentence, but David can’t ask, because Jake’s tugging his hat off before leaning in, fingers brushing David’s jaw as he presses his mouth against David’s. David’s pulse has kicked up to hypertime, and he doesn’t know if it’s panic or not, thinks it probably is but doesn’t _care_ , everywhere Jake’s touching him hypersensitive, from where their knees are brushing, to his fingers over David’s racing pulse, his lips against David’s, a chaste press that he pulls back from too soon.

“Movie?” Jake mumbles, lips still brushing David’s. “Salad? I promise it’s awesome.”

David blinks his eyes open, Jake’s face, too close, swimming into his vision. He pulls back. “Do you not want--”

“Dude,” Jake says. “ _Yes._ Totally yes. Just. Movie, dinner? If the movie’s really boring, we can make out on the couch.”

He says it so matter-of-factly, like it’s just something to do if there isn’t anything better, like it won’t be the only thing David’s thinking about, sitting beside him. 

“Okay,” David says, hesitant.

“Awesome,” Jake says. He says that so much it’s lost all meaning. He bounces up. “You want to find something to watch?” He hands the remote over, and David takes it, watches his back retreat into the kitchen, which is open enough that David can see him clattering around, and he catches the edge of a grin before he turns the TV on.

**Author's Note:**

> The training camp described is based off the Biosteel camp, however I have taken significant liberties with duration, size and other such details. It is based in Toronto, though!


End file.
